Medical equipment from Kennedy assassination now in Kansas

Published 6:00 pm, Monday, January 28, 2008

The medical equipment used in the attempt to save President John F. Kennedy's after he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 has been moved to underground storage in suburban Kansas City.

The artifacts, known to archivists as the Parkland Memorial Hospital Trauma Room No. 1 collection, are now in underground storage in Johnson County in space leased by the Central Plains Region of the National Archives and Records Administration. The artifacts from Parkland Hospital were brought from a Fort Worth, Texas, facility after the lease on space there expired.

The items include a wheeled stretcher, the room's door, a wall clock, a trash can and a wall-mounted towel dispenser. They were moved in late September.

The Lenexa facility said that in keeping with the National Archives' policy, it does not allow access to the Parkland Hospital material. The items, which fill about 300 cubic feet, won't be displayed, inspected or photographed.

Contemporary archives' officials believe they are honoring the intent of their predecessors, who acquired the materials to keep them from memorabilia dealers.

"My understanding of the original intent was to make sure that ghoulish souvenir hunters wouldn't be out peddling this stuff," Reed Whitaker, regional administrator of the Central Plains Region, told The Kansas City Star for a story Tuesday.

The federal acquisition of the materials began with a February 1971 letter from the Dallas County Hospital District, which administered Parkland, to an official with the Smithsonian Institution.

The district's chairman advised that Parkland was scheduled to be remodeled and raised the possibility of the Smithsonian Institution acquiring the trauma room artifacts from 1963. The General Services Administration bought the items two years later.

The Smithsonian and the John F. Kennedy Library both were not interested in the artifacts.

"The Kennedy Library staff feels, and I agree, that it is premature to transfer these materials to the library," wrote Robert M. Warner, archivist of the United States, in a 1980 letter. "Because the assassination is yet too fresh in the minds of many, and in view of the close association of the Kennedy family with the library, transfer to the library would not now be appropriate."

The facility near Kansas City is underground, a cheaper alternative to aboveground facilities, said Tom Mills, assistant archivist for regional records services. It also has temperature and humidity controls.

The materials also include a suction machine, an overhead operating room light, an X-ray film illuminator and a packet of latex gloves.

"I think this is part of the 'fetishization' of the Kennedy assassination," said Robert Stone, director of the documentary "Oswald's Ghost." "The preservation of absolutely every possible thing, however remotely related it might be, almost has a theological element."